Sunday, 9 August 2015

A year after Minister Heather Humphreys abused her public office for party gain and got away with it, and 9 months after the Minister for Public Reform brought in new state board appointment guidelines in response, which said that the Department/Minister must consult with and use the Public Appointment Service (PAS) to interview potential candidates, is the Minister giving full information to the PAS?

I hasn't noticed that the 5 year term the Chair of the board of IMMA Eoin Mcgonigal appointed on the 09/07/2010 had expired on the 08/07/2015 until the beginning of July. I then noticed that the board members list was out of date by 9 months

surely if you are putting out ads for replacements and mix of skills you know who is on the IMMA board at the moment?

On August 6th I got this reply.

As stated below, the information on our site is drawn from a database maintained by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform which we do not have access to. The names we have of the current members of the IMMA board is identical to the information on the stateboards website save for Julie O'Neill.

Guidelines that may have been breached under Section 10. Development of a specification for board role, page 5.

10.1 Where a new appointment will be necessary Departments should formally initiate the appointments process at least six months before the term of the current member expires by engaging with PAS to develop a detailed and comprehensive draft specification of the proposed Board role.

Certainly breached this one as between 3 and 7 vacancies existed including the chair.

10.2 The specification provided to PAS must set out key requirements for the board role(s) including:-

necessary skills, knowledge and expertise;

breadth of experience and required sectoral / stakeholder expertise;

other desirable qualifications;

range of skills of existing Board members(s)

diversity and other matters for considerations (e.g. geographical balance, international membership)

personal attributes

How could they be following the guideline 10.2, if the PAS didn't know who was on the board?

10.4 This specification will follow a detailed template for all State Board roles to be developed by PAS which sets out a clear format for the detail and quality of information provided in respect of each Board role.

How could they be following the guideline 10.4, if the PAS didn't know who was on the board?

10.5 The draft specification provided by the Department to PAS must also reflect the outcome of consultation with the current Chair of the Board. In this context, the Chair should advise the Department of the needs of the board for new skills, competencies or experience in order to ensure that it can effectively perform its role drawing from, for example, the Chair’s annual review of the Board’s effectiveness

How could they be following the guideline 10.5, if the PAS didn't know who was on the board?

10.6 The final specification for the Board positions must be agreed by the relevant Department with PAS on the basis of PAS’s assessment of any changes necessary to ensure that the specification is adequate to encourage the submission of expressions of interest and to be clearly identify a list of candidates for consideration by the Minister for the Board role.

How could they be following the guideline 10.6, if the PAS didn't know who was on the board?

Or perhaps the person replying to me didn't check with the PAS employee that actually engaged with the Dept of Arts?

and the board had been kept at 9 members for over 2 years but now despite having said that the board would be reduced to 9 it will be now set at 12, see incredible spin the department PR person,

Having emailed the Department of Arts and the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to ask was was currently on the board and getting no reply for whole week, I had to depend on political correspondent for Today FM Gavan Reilly to get me that answer.

Bills in respect of which heads have been agreed and texts are being drafted

Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht

Title of Bill

Purpose of Bill

Status of Bill

43

National Cultural Institutions (No. 1) Bill

To revise and update the governance arrangements in regard to the National Gallery, Irish Museum of Modern Art and Crawford Art Gallery Cork, including shared services

Publication Expected - Late 2015

Also clearly breached another guideline under Section 13. Appointment of Board Members,

13.5 It is expected that following the completion of the PAS process and the communication of the outcome of that process to the relevant Minister, that the appointment shall in normal circumstances be made in advance of the vacancy arising unless there are compelling reasons why this is not possible

The Stateboard website does have detailed quartely statistics on its front page, but what it doesn't tell you is whether it is meeting the timeline targets in guidelines 13.5 and 10.1. I combined Q1 and Q2 states here